WMGRs Catalog Access Rules for WooCommerce
Show every visitor only the catalog they should see. Hide wholesale items from retail customers, retail bundles from wholesale buyers, or your whole B2B range from guests.
WooCommerce gives you one catalog and shows it to everybody. That is fine for a shop with one kind of customer, and wrong the moment you have two. Trade-only lines end up visible to the public, retail multipacks clutter the wholesale browse, and the distributor range you are contractually not allowed to advertise sits there in your sitemap. The usual workarounds — unpublishing products, running a second site, hiding things behind a password — all cost you either sales or a second store to maintain.
This plugin fixes it at the level WooCommerce actually asks the question. You write rules that say hide these products, or these whole categories, from this role — and everything downstream obeys. Hidden items vanish from the shop page, category archives and product search. Their direct URLs redirect to the shop rather than 404ing. Add-to-cart is refused even if somebody constructs an ?add-to-cart= link by hand. Hidden categories disappear from category widgets, menus and the [product_categories] shortcode, so nothing points at a door that will not open.
Rules stack rather than compete. Each rule adds its hidden items for the role it targets, so a wholesale role and a guest can have completely different views of the same store without you reasoning about precedence. There is also an “Everyone” target for temporarily pulling an item from the whole storefront — useful when a line goes out of stock indefinitely and you do not want to change its status and lose its URL.
Features
- Hide specific products or whole categories (with all their products) per user role or from guests
- An “Everyone” option to temporarily hide items from the whole storefront
- Hidden items disappear from the shop page, category pages, and product search
- Direct product URLs redirect to the shop; hidden category archives too
- Add-to-cart is blocked for hidden products — even via direct ?add-to-cart= links
- Hidden categories also vanish from category widgets, menus and the [product_categories] shortcode
- Related products and shortcode loops respect the rules
- Multiple rules stack — each rule adds its hidden items for its role
- Lightweight: no extra tables, per-request caching of rule lookups
- Compatible with WooCommerce High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS)
Who it is for
Wholesale and trade suppliers who must not show trade pricing or trade-only lines to the public. B2B stores serving both businesses and consumers from one catalog. Membership sites where part of the range is a member benefit. Distributors and resellers under agreements that restrict what they may advertise publicly. And any store that has ever unpublished a product just to get it out of sight.
How it works
- Go to WooCommerce Catalog Access Add Rule.
- Choose who the rule hides from — a user role, guests, or everyone.
- Pick the products or categories it hides.
- Save. The rule takes effect immediately, everywhere the catalog is shown.
Built to stay out of the way
No database tables are added and no front-end scripts are loaded. Rules are applied through WooCommerce’s own visibility and query filters, with rule lookups cached per request so a page full of products does not re-read the rules for each one. Uninstalling removes the single option it stores and leaves your products exactly as they were.
The Woo Managers B2B suite
Combine with Role Based Pricing, Tiered Pricing, Request a Quote, B2B Registration & Approval and Min Max Order Rules by Woo Managers for a complete B2B store.
Need more?
A premium version with per-user visibility, full private-store mode, hide-from-sitemap/SEO controls, replacement placeholder content and country-based visibility is coming at woomanagers.com.